Our History

SolveTech’s History

Doug Lawrence

ESTABLISHED IN WILMINGTON, DE USA IN 1981, SolveTech, Inc. was founded by Doug Lawrence. In 1981, Doug left the DuPont Experimental Station to form his own company performing consulting and product development work. He is an Electrical Engineer from the University of Delaware and expert in circuit design and research and development.

The first generation of thickness gauges were developed in 1986 to test variability in thickness on polyester film lines. The company then went on to enhance the technology and, in 1988, introduced the first commercially viable, double-sided (parallel plate) capacitance gauges. This technology brought significant new levels of performance in accuracy and speed, along with the concepts of user-definable measurement footprints and gaps.

Article from 1990 discussing SolveTech technology

In 1989, the first Array gauges were created. These gauges provided the first high speed “terrain maps” of extruded products. In subsequent years, there has been continuous improvement to the technology. It has been successfully applied to numerous applications involving a wide variety of materials and geometries.

In 2001, SolveTech took its online technology and applied it for use in the lab. The result was the PR2000 Precision Profiler which has now been implemented by many companies as their worldwide standard. The SC1000 Spot Checker was later developed in 2004 for lab use for difficult to measure materials such as ceramic tape.

Rob Lawrence

In 2015, Doug’s son Rob Lawrence joined the company as the Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Rob had interned with the company growing up and joined again after obtaining a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering degree from Cornell University and years of industrial sales experience. SolveTech went on to expand its global sales to Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Mexico through the addition of local distributors and representatives in those areas.

In 2016, SolveTech focuses finding new solutions for our customers. SolveTech continues to be an innovator in the marketplace and develops new products using its market leading capacitance gauging technology. In January, they successfully introduced their technology to the nonwoven market.

In 2017, SolveTech co-authored ASTM standard D8136, and filed a provisional patent for new gauging technology.